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“... and settles the fate of his people. The Perfect Nine takes this myth and turns it on its head. Ngũgĩ makes the daughters of Mũmbi and Gĩkũyũ agents of their own destinies, and fleshes out the story, offering a prelude to the arrival at Mount Kenya and more realised landscapes and pastoral scenes. But the book’s most interesting feature is its ...”

“... In 1962​ the young Ngugi wa Thiong’o had a piece of good fortune. He had left Kenya for Uganda, where he was enrolled as an undergraduate at Makerere, in Kampala. As he explains in Birth of a Dream Weaver, the third of his memoirs, the university was hosting a conference on ‘African writers of English expression’, and he was invited to join a panel on the strength of a handful of short stories published by a local press in Kenya ...”

“... writers such as J.M. Coetzee and V.S. Naipaul, or of the grand old man of Kenyan letters, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, but what he refers to as their ‘stingy prose’ is also an index of what he is writing against. Their pained grappling with questions of conscience is not his natural mode. Though far from superficial in its engagement with the world, One ...”

“... The timeframe of Memory of Departure, for instance, echoes A Grain of Wheat (1967) by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, an impressive novel set in the days preceding Kenyan independence, and looking back to the Mau Mau rebellion (Gurnah wrote a lucid introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition). Admiring Silence (1997), in which an angry, thwarted ...”

“... took advantage of a trip to Nairobi to make contact with the wife of the imprisoned writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Femi’s trepidation at such assignments was genuine. Equally genuine however was his relish of them! He revelled in the business of flattening letters and cash into false compartments of his suitcase, making clandestine phone calls from the ...”

“... and hired thugs to suppress the unrest in Nairobi’s slums. The argument of figures such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o that Kibaki deserved a second term on the basis of opening up a democratic space for the Kenyan people now looks like a very poor joke. Kibaki, a man who has built his political career on his image as a conciliatory technocrat, apparently ...”

“... had been introduced to the rest of the world as Team Africa: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ waThiong’o, Bessie Head, Mongo Beti, Es’kia Mphahlele – the list went on. Wainaina himself was modest about his ascent: he saw himself as one of many young writers creating a pan-African literary idiom for ...”

“... Contributors included James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as well as a cohort of South African writers who were wrestling with apartheid, among them Nadine Gordimer, Ezekiel Mphelele, Dennis Brutus and Lewis Nkosi.From the start, Transition had commissioned work from political figures. In the second ...”

“... ten years in exile’. Here, Bulawayo joins the long list of African novelists – Sembène, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and others – who argue that the project of nation-building or reconciliation requires a reimagining of the past. Destiny finishes her book, but the story doesn’t end there. I won’t give ...”

“... intellectuals today, while the work of an older generation of writers – Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe and the novelist and film director, Sembène Ousmane – is never without some strong descriptive trace of the dispossession Davidson has in mind. And though there are problems with this sense of a disabling legacy – for ...”